Dead Past (33 page)

“Not that drastic, but field everything you can,” said Diane.

She sat down at her desk and looked at the package a moment before she unwrapped it. The doll was in almost-new condition. It was a pretty doll with a porcelain head, feet, and hands, and a soft body. It had a head full of black finger curls and an ornate green satin bonnet and satin green dress trimmed in white fur. Her feet were covered in high-top patent leather shoes and white stockings. She carried a white fur muff in one hand, attached by a piece of elastic sewn into the muff and looped over the wrist. It was a nice doll, but not an expensive one. Diane’s sister collected dolls, so Diane had a passing familiarity with them.

Diane leaned back in her chair and focused her eyes on the table fountain and the water running over the rocks.
The making of palimpsests was possible even with papyri.
That was such an odd phrase. What exactly did it mean—other than the obvious literal meaning? Diane knew what a palimpsest was, but she grabbed her Webster’s dictionary anyway and looked it up:

Diane knew that it was a practice in ancient times to erase the work of an earlier author and reuse the parchment to pen another piece of work. Sometimes the earlier work can still be deciphered. Korey Jordan, her head conservator, had revealed the earlier writing on a medieval parchment that was a palimpsest.

Why would a kidnapper or killer use a sentence like that? What was the meaning in that context?

But the more important mystery in her mind was why had she heard it in the library—apparently the exact sentence. Was it actually more common than she thought? She got on her computer and flipped over to the Internet and Googled the sentence with quotations. No hits whatsoever. She removed the quotations and tried again. She got a lot of hits, but none that contained the words in any combination even close to the sentence she heard. She clicked on her bookmark of the Gutenberg project and searched the offerings. Nothing.

So, it didn’t seem to be a common quotation. Then who in the library said it? She closed her eyes and tried to remember the voice. Female? That’s what she thought she remembered.

It seemed to stretch the imagination that it could be the same person who had said it in Florida twenty years ago, here now—in the university library. But it was quite a coincidence. Her thoughts were interrupted by her intercom.

“Sorry, Dr. Fallon. It’s David. I thought you might want to talk with him.”

“Thank you, Andie. Put him through.”

“Diane, I did the search in Arizona and Florida and found no such murders. I increased the dates and increased the area of search—still nothing that fit your criteria. Sorry.”

“Thanks, David. If I get any more variables, I may ask you to search again.”

“Sure.”

She hung up the phone.

“Well, damn,” she said out loud. “I was so sure.”

She picked up the doll again and looked into its dark eyes.
So this doll has a secret?
To Diane, that meant one thing. She lifted the dress and examined the stitching.

 

When they were children, Diane’s sister had collected Madame Alexander dolls, pushed baby dolls around in strollers, and dressed and undressed her extensive assemblage of Barbie dolls. Diane, on the other hand, had played with hers in a wholly different manner. Her dolls were couriers, adventurers, and spies. She often used them to carry secret messages. A message might be hidden in their clothes, inside the hole of a dislocated arm or leg, or sewn up in their torso.

Diane examined the stitching of Juliet’s doll with a magnifying glass. No sign of the legs being detached and reattached, nor were there any repaired tears in the torso. She carefully undressed the doll and checked the arm attachments. Nothing at the right arm, but the left arm had been restitched by hand. Diane smiled with delight as she took fingernail scissors and snipped the thread.

She pulled the stuffing from the arm. The result was a pile of fluffy white fill on her desk, but nothing else. She stuffed the fill back into the arm with a pencil eraser and turned her attention to the torso. She began pulling the fill out of the armhole. This produced quite a large pile. The doll was now flattened in the middle. She saw nothing but stuffing. She pulled it apart to see if there was something in it she missed when she was taking it out. She hadn’t.

She really hoped that Juliet and her grandmother did not come to her office right now.

With a penlight from her desk drawer she looked inside the empty sack that was the torso of the doll. Still nothing. She stuck the tip of her little finger up in the doll’s head.

There it was.

It felt like a slip of paper. Diane grinned broadly. There is nothing like the thrill of discovering a hidden message. She managed to tease the edge of the paper through the opening in the doll’s head far enough that she could grasp it with her fingertips and pull it out.

It was a piece of newsprint, yellowed with age, rolled up when it was put inside the doll, and now lying in a loose coil. She unrolled the strip of paper on her desktop. After all the trouble she had gone to, she expected it to say something like
Inspected by #12.
But it did not.

Printed on the paper was a series of capital letters in groups, like words in an enigmatic foreign language.

It looked like a code if Diane had ever seen one. She was so gleeful she laughed out loud. OK, it was a code. Was it child’s play, as hers were? Someone could take apart a few of her old dolls today and find notes still inside them containing lines of scribbled letters and numbers that stood for nothing more or less than a child’s adventurous imagination at work. This could be like that . . . or it could mean something important. No way to tell at the moment.

Jin liked to do puzzles and ciphers. He frequently contributed his logic puzzles and cryptograms to puzzle magazines. This would be a job for him.

She keyed the lines of code into her word processing program, double-checked it, and saved it under a password—then immediately felt utterly silly. She was a kid again playing games with dolls. She cut a thin piece off the scrap of paper and put it in a vial, then locked the code—or whatever it was—in her safe.

When the fill was back in the torso, she took a needle and thread from a small emergency sewing kit in her desk drawer and reattached the arm with fine stitches. That done, she redressed the doll. Thank goodness, it looked as good as new. She wrapped it in the paper Mrs. Torkel brought it in and put it in her drawer. Just as she closed the drawer, there was a knock on her door.

“Come in,” she called, and Kendel entered her office.

“Hi. Andie said you wanted to see me. Sorry I’m late, I was up talking to Korey about courses he wants to teach.”

“That’s fine. I have something I need you to find.”

“Oh, a new acquisition?” Kendel smiled, showing a bright white set of teeth.

“No, this is something different and will surely test your abilities,” said Diane.

“OK, I’m intrigued,” said Kendel.

Diane turned to her computer, typed in the palimpsest phrase, printed it out, and gave it to Kendel.

“The making of palimpsests was possible even with papyri,”
she read, then looked up, her eyes wide and eyebrows raised.

“I want to know where it’s from. I’ve looked on Google and Project Gutenberg. I heard it spoken in the university library recently, but it goes back at least twenty years.”

Kendel smiled and tapped the piece of paper on her hand. “I’ll accept your challenge.”

“Thanks, Kendel. Would you take this to Korey for me? I would like to know if he can give me a ballpark figure on how old the paper is.”

Kendel took the vial and looked at the piece of paper inside it.

“Looks too modern for C14,” she said.

“He’ll probably just have to do a chemical analysis. Something quick.”

Kendel gave her another smile. “And you thought I might want to work at other museums.”

When Kendel left, Diane printed out the string of coded letters she had found in the doll and put them in her pocket. Before going back to the crime lab, she called Laura.

“Diane. How is the Juliet investigation coming?”

“Interesting,” said Diane.

“It always scares me when people say ‘interesting.’ ”

“Funny you should talk about words scaring people,” said Diane.

“I know. Juliet has a few that scare her,” said Laura.

“I discovered, firsthand.” Diane explained about Juliet’s breakdown in the aquatic room. “I assume she’ll be calling you about it.”

“Wow,” Laura said. “It’s obviously associated with her trauma. But how in the world? She said a scary man said it to her? When she was seven?”

“She was unclear. At first she said he was talking to her; then she said she didn’t know.”

“I know what papyri is. What is a palimpsest?” said Laura.

Diane explained what it was and gave her a short history.

“What could it mean in this case?” she asked.

“I have no idea. I asked Kendel to track down its origin. She’s good at finding things.”

“She’s the one who found the snake in her drawer, right? I heard about that.”

“That was Kendel,” said Diane.

“Have you had any luck finding a mass murder around the time of Juliet’s kidnapping?”

“None whatsoever—not in Arizona or Florida.”

“So that’s a dead end,” said Laura.

“For now.”

“You aren’t letting go of that notion, are you?”

Diane could imagine Laura’s amused but stern face on the other end of the phone.

“I’m putting it aside until I have more evidence. When you talk to Juliet, ask her where she was in her flashback. It didn’t sound like Arizona. I’ve been to Arizona, and there’s not a lot of vegetation.”

“There’s plenty of vegetation,” said Laura. “Just not the kind you’re used to.”

“At any rate, see what you make of her description,” said Diane.

“You’re determined, aren’t you?” said Laura.

“I’m thorough,” said Diane. “There’s something else I need to tell you. I called her grandmother. She told me Juliet had visited her the month before she was kidnapped.”

“Really?” said Laura. “That is interesting. It’s just what you suspected.”

“That’s also the time she acquired the doll her grandmother accused her of stealing.”

“OK, that’s interesting, too. What else?”

“I asked her grandmother to send the doll to me. She delivered it in person. She was with me when Juliet had her flashback.”

“Maybe the doll is what triggered . . .”

“She didn’t see the doll. It was wrapped up. My original idea was to give you the doll to integrate into her therapy, or whatever. But her grandmother said something about the doll that reminded me of things I did as a kid. She said the doll had a secret.”

“And?” prompted Laura when Diane didn’t say anything.

“Do you remember how I used to play with my dolls?”

“You mean tear their heads off?”

“Funny. No, those were my sister’s Barbies. I hid secret messages inside mine.”

“I remember now. You were a cross between Dr. Frankenstein and Mata Hari,” said Laura. “That’s probably why I went into psychiatry—to understand
your
childhood, rather than mine.”

“You’re really full of yourself today, aren’t you? Well, wait until you hear.”

Diane described her dismemberment of Juliet’s doll and what she found inside.

“You’re not kidding? You actually found something?”

Diane smiled with satisfaction at Laura’s amazement.

“Now I just have to decode it, provided it’s not a meaningless string of gibberish—which it most likely is.”

“You have surprised me again. Send the doll to me and I’ll keep it here and talk with Juliet about it,” said Laura.

“OK. I’ll bring it by.” Diane hung up the phone, put on her coat, and took the package out of her drawer.

“Andie,” she said as she walked through her office, “I’m going to drop a package by Laura Hillard’s. I’ll be back within the hour. Call the crime lab and tell David to expect me.”

“Sure.”

Diane walked to her car, clicking open the locks on the way. It was still cold. She thought she heard on the weather forecast that it was going to warm up. She was about to open her door when she felt the point of a gun barrel stuck in her back.

 

Diane’s first emotion was disbelief. Here in front of the museum with so many people coming and going, someone was holding a gun on her? It had to be a joke. Then came the voice—a throaty blend of age and years of smoking cigarettes.

“Just give me the package,” he said. “If you don’t, I have no problem opening fire on the line of tourists unloading from that bus over here behind us.”

Diane had seen the tour bus arriving when she walked out. She handed him the package over her shoulder.

“Now, that’s good. All you have to do now is stand here looking inside your car for five minutes while we get out of here. Same thing applies. You move or try to get a look and I’ll open fire. Nod your head if we have an agreement.”

Diane nodded. She felt the pressure release from her back and she heard the footfalls walk away. She didn’t move her head; she couldn’t risk the safety of the visitors. But she shifted her eyes looking for a reflective surface somewhere in her car to perhaps see something of the gunman. There was none. She waited for several minutes until the passengers from the bus were inside the museum. It was another field trip of schoolchildren. She watched as they passed her car and filed into the building.